Electrical Cable Harness and Conduit Design
|Video: Create Electrical Routes, Cables, and Wires Quickly||
Quickly design and route electrical wiring, harnessing, cabling, and conduit assemblies of products in 3D using the SOLIDWORKS Premium package. Integrating these systems during product design rather than adding them later accelerates your development process, saves time and rework costs, and helps to ensure efficient product assembly and serviceability.
Electrical Cable Harness and Conduit Design Overview
SOLIDWORKS Premium includes design tools that build a path of pipes, tubes, or electrical cables for your assembly. These tools cover the needs of a growing number of products that use sensors, control systems, and other systems that require wiring and cabling.
Routing creates a special type of subassembly that builds a path of pipes, tubes, or electrical cables between components. Routes include electrical wiring enclosures, fabricated cable, soldered copper, PVC, flexible tubing, welded piping, and associated fittings. Start the route by inserting route components into an assembly to define the start and end connection points of the path. Next, define the path using a 3D sketch. Then, SOLIDWORKS software generates the pipe, tube, and wire parts along the centerline and connects the parts to the route components.
Specific electrical cable harness and conduit design functionality includes the ability to:
- Position all equipment and run electrical routes throughout the overall design
- Route electrical cable, harness, and conduit systems through your product, including ribbon cable
- Determine required lengths of all wires, cables, harness segments as you design
- Flatten electrical cable harness for manufacturing documentation
- Import “From-To” electrical connection information from schematic design tools
- Automatically route segments through your products to speed creation
- Generate complete bill of material (BOM) and wire cut lists for harnesses for manufacturing
- Create cable harnesses as mechanical-only or with electrical data
- Run rigid or flexible electrical conduit segments
- Include additional components, such as mounting hardware, splices, connectors, insulation, looms, heat-shrink tubing, cable ties
- Routing Library Manager (RLM) wizard to guide creation of custom electrical components